David Lucifer
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FWD: recent Foresight event
« on: 2002-05-03 11:33:43 » |
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A short but interesting trip report from Ben Goertzel (of Webmind fame) about the recent Foresight Senior Associates Gathering. The work I am doing with Peter Voss gets a prominent mention at the beginning. 
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf
Of Ben Goertzel
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 7:53 PM
To: sl4@sysopmind.com
Subject: RE: recent Foresight event
> At the recent Foresight Senior Associates gathering (April 26-28, 2002,
> Hotel Crowne Plaza Cabana, Palo Alto) , the Singularity was featured in
> several presentations (although not mentioned in the website program
> preview: http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/spring2002/program.html ).
> Foresight noted: `For the first time, this meeting is not
> "off-the-record."' I know Eliezer and John Smart spoke; perhaps others in
> the SL4 forum also attended. As a distant but interested Australian, I'd
> welcome any news reports of this potentially important occasion.
>
> Damien Broderick
Hi,
I was there, as a representative of the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung, a German paper that I write for sometimes.
Frankly, there wasn't much said on the formal program there that would be novel in any way to folks on this list. I think that the Foresight Senior Associates Gathering exists mainly to bring Silicon Valley investors and businessfolk up to speed on radical techno-futurist thinking. There are no highly technical presentations; it's more a matter of techies and policy wonks bringing the investment/business audience up to speed on recent developments and ideas.
That's not to say there weren't plenty of interesting conversations "off the program" though.
For instance, I saw a demo of Peter Voss's Artificial-General-Intelligence in the making, a highly sophisticated, vaguely neural-nettish program that is learning to recognize patterns in visual scenes and other things, and to carry out actions coordinated with its perceptions etc. Still in the early stages of development, but definitely interesting & impressive. (Of course, Eliezer, Peter and I each have our skepticism about the others' approaches to AI; but even though Peter's approach is not my chosen approach, I still think it makes good sense and has a nonzero chance of success at the grand goal. I think there are *many* routes to real AI, although I do think my route is the best one I've seen so far ... and I know Peter thinks the same about his 
And Steve Jurvetson (the VC from DFJ), as well as walking around with a silly-looking blinkie in his ear, was pursuing a long conversation with Eliezer and others on the question of whether evolution *necessarily* leads to selfish creatures, or whether it would be pragmatically possible to evolve creatures with compassion as the fitness function.
There was one presentation that touched on notions of Friendly AI, but didn't directly refer to Eliezer's work, and in my view presented a somewhat simplistic perspective. It was proposed that "greater intelligence automatically leads to greater morality because it allows beings to better see the consequences of their actions." I'd *like* to believe this was true in some sort of statistical way, in spite of numerous obvious anecdotal counterexamples, but no convincing argument was presented. This presentation was a little disappointing in that one would at least have liked it to REFER to Eliezer's presentation from last year, so as to give the feeling of incremental progress from year to year. But I suppose that philosophy rarely gives the same feeling of ongoing progress in the way that science and engineering do.
Ray Kurzweil gave a nice "special interest group" on the Singularity. He made pretty clear, in response to some pointed questions by Peter Voss after the formal meeting was done, that he believes the "imitate the human brain closely" approach is by far the most likely path to artificial general intelligence. I think this is close to the view of Eugene Leitl, on this list, and others as well I presume. After enough repeated exposures I have to say I get a little weary of Kurzweil's graphs of the impending Singularity -- but even so, I'm glad he's out there tirelessly making the point, which the vast majority of the educated human race still refuses to get.
On the more practical side, Barry Bunin demonstrated some really cool biochemical database software being made at his company Libraria. This kind of work -- providing databases of knowledge spanning multiple areas of science -- is paving the way for massive scientific progress in a kind of low-key way. 'Cause it's these databases that near-future AI's will study to figure out how to improve humanity genomically...
A change from last year is that this year there were a few venture capitalists *eager* to talk to entrepreneurs. Last year on the other hand, the investor community seemed to be in a totally quiescent phase. Now it seems almost half-awake ;-p
Etc. There was plenty more, this was just a quasi-random sampling...
-- Ben G
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